Is YouTube Gaming able to compete with Twitch?

20 January 2016

As envisioned by Google its new service YouTube Gaming is intended to become a direct competitor of Twitch, focusing on game streaming and providing users with instruments for broadcasting. But how big are the chances that YouTube Gaming will excel the widely recognized leader in this segment?

Interface of YouTube Gaming generally resembles Twitch. There is a list of popular videos at the top of the page, which can be filtered according to certain categories. There is a separate page for users who stream their games or edit videos.

In the main window of the platform you can watch live streams. On sidebars you will find game titles that can be added to the list of favourites (you will receive notifications regarding them). Here you can also choose the so called trend – the most popular game. In this tab you can watch for updates, subscribe for channels and watch championships.

Needless to say that YouTube Gaming supports a possibility to comment on video and gives an opportunity to directly contact the authors of streams.

The system is fitted with integrated filter, which automatically throws away video not related to gaming. In general the interface of this new service is quite user-friendly.

The main advantage of YouTube Gaming over Twitch is support of streaming at 60 frames per second - administration promises the introduction of this function. Besides that, YouTube Gaming supports buffering - any video can be rewound to any point and users can start watching it from the very beginning.

At this stage we can say that in the future, with growth of popularity YouTube Gaming can become a serious rival to Twitch – largely due to the fact that Google corporation stands behind it. Nevertheless, it is unlikely that the popular streaming service will face customer churn – it has been on the market for too long. Most probably, players will have simultaneous channels in the nearest future, but in the coming years YouTube Gaming is doomed to take back seat.